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28-Mar-2010 -- This was the first successful visit to N5 E102. The Confluence is a little over eleven kilometres north of a little Town called Gua Musang.

We took the night train from Kuala Lumpur, arriving long before dawn. On the way we had studied the report of the incomplete visit by Karl Lippe and compared it with the satellite imagery from Google maps. We could trace Karl's route along the loggers trails through the jungle, and thought we knew where he went wrong.

We took an early breakfast consisting of bright yellow stew consisting of fish heads and piles of rice while we debated the right approach and waited for the sun to come up. A visit to a nearby bus stop proved to be a disappointment, no bus was going north from Gua Musang.

So we started to walk along the road, and hoped someone would let us hop in. We asked for directions at a bar a little north of the town center. One of the guys there cut the lengthy explanations short by just driving us up.

We hopped off at the gas station next to a mosque Karl had started out at his first attempt. We chatted with a bunch of loggers for a few minutes who were busy loading fertilizer on small trucks. They were very amused to meet foreigners at this unlikely place. We followed a forest road winding its way up the hill east of the main road towards Dabong. After a few hundred meters the workers we met earlier overtook us. They took us with them and so we got a ride on the trailer sitting on huge piles of fertilizer.

When we entered the other side of the valley we saw that the satellite imagery we studied was completely out of date. The dense forest was cleared, by burning down a huge area north and east from the small settlement at which we left the car. The piles of fertilizer, as it turned out, were destined to nurture thousands of pots with small palm plants and other crops. Apparently the area will be turned into another enormous palm plantation in the foreseeable future. The trucks stopped a few hundred meters from the confluence. To our amazement we found a huge windowless bunker-like concrete structure at the very spot of the confluence. We ate the lunch packets we had originally bought to sustain us during a long hike through dense tropic vegetation, took the necessary pictures, and rode back on another trailer afterwards. Back on the main road we said goodbye to the loggers, and hitchhiked back to Gua Musang. The whole affair took us just a few hours.